Science

Hackaday ☛ Skimming Satellites: On The Edge Of The Atmosphere

Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this problem. By putting a satellite into what’s known as a very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a spacecraft will experience enough drag that maintaining its velocity requires constantly firing its thrusters. Naturally this presents its own technical challenges, but the upside is that such an orbit is essentially self-cleaning — should the craft’s propulsion fail, it would fall out of orbit and burn up in months or even weeks. As an added bonus, operating at a lower altitude has other practical advantages, such as allowing for lower latency communication.

VLEO satellites hold considerable promise, but successfully operating in this unique environment requires certain design considerations. The result are vehicles that look less like the flying refrigerators we’re used to, with a hybrid design that features the sort of aerodynamic considerations more commonly found on aircraft.

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Why the mad artistic genius trope doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Winter’s natural wonders: seven tips to entice you outside and dose yourself up with joy

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Growing up alongside deadly fires inspired me to study them – and fight flames with swarms of drones

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Humans returned to British Isles earlier than previously thought at the end of the last ice age

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] What the first medical evacuation from the International Space Station tells us about healthcare in space

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Why do some people get ‘hangry’ more quickly than others?

Career/Education

Stanford University ☛ Senior Scaries: What if I don’t want to change the world?

In this installment of her column, Ye grapples with her career aspirations and how they will fit into her personal life.

Amber Settle ☛ Experience matters

What I am realizing this quarter is that teaching only the introductory programming classes for more than a decade fundamentally changed me as an instructor. When I previously taught algorithms, it was a lecture approach, in which I did things on the board and students listened. That approach just doesn’t work in introductory programming classes at DePaul, so I developed a more interactive style of teaching. And when I came back to algorithms, I couldn’t go back to the lecture approach since it feels weird to me now. So I made an algorithms class with lots of interactive development of materials and daily on-paper activities.

Computational Complexity ☛ Community

He missed a critical point. While departments play an official role in hosting academic programs, they importantly serve as the main community for the faculty within the department. You see your colleagues in the department in meetings, at seminars and just walking by them in the hallways. They are your peers and the ones who hired you and judge your promotion and tenure cases. You will argue with them but you all share a common mission to make your department as strong as possible, so you can attract even better colleagues.

Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I left Toastmasters

While I doubt that me writing this down is going to cause any actual change, here’s what I feel needs to change in Toastmasters.

Addy Osmani ☛ 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity.

These lessons are what I wish I’d known earlier. Some would have saved me months of frustration. Others took years to fully understand. None of them are about specific technologies - those change too fast to matter. They’re about the patterns that keep showing up, project after project, team after team.

I’m sharing them because I’ve benefited enormously from engineers who did the same for me. Consider this my attempt to pay it forward.

Futurism ☛ Gen Z Arriving at College Unable to Read

As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”

Wilson is one of the professors who’s had to quietly lower her academic benchmarks thanks to the rise in barely literate Gen Zers graduating American high schools.

Rather than assigning reading outside of class, the literature professor told Fortune she’s adopted a kind of in-class popcorn reading, reciting passages together and discussing them “line by line.” Even that, unfortunately, might be a bit of a stretch for students these days.

Hardware

CNX Software ☛ Geehy G32R430 Arm Cortex-M52 Encoder MCU features Arctangent accelerator, dual 16-bit ADC for industrial motion control systems

Last year, Geehy introduced the industry’s first dual-core Cortex-M52 real-time MCU, and has now followed up with the G32R430, an Arm Cortex-M52 Encoder MCU with two 16-bit ADCs and a hardware ATAN (arctangent) accelerator for sub-1 µs electrical angle computation in high-precision encoder and motion control systems. The MCU is clocked at 128 MHz and uses ITCM/DTCM tightly coupled memory for deterministic, zero-wait-state execution, alongside a 4KB cache for low-latency control loops. It integrates two 16-bit high-precision ADCs with support for synchronous sampling, along with an extra 12-bit ADC, multiple analog comparators, DACs, and an on-chip temperature sensor, allowing encoder designs to be built with very few external analog components.

Tom’s Hardware ☛ ‘We can’t completely vacate the client market’ says Intel amid wafer supply shortages — Nova Lake still on-track for late 2026 release, 14A in 2028

Intel reconfirmed its commitment to the consumer market during its Q4 2025 earnings, despite a heavy focus on wafer supply shortages and increased demand from the data center and AI markets. The company is shifting its internal wafer supply to the DCAI segment while relying on external wafer supply for CCG (Client Compute Group).

The Register UK ☛ Intel prioritizes Xeons over client chips to meet AI demand

In other words, Intel is prioritizing higher-margin Core-series parts to make way for Xeons, and cheap PCs packing low-end Intel processors may become harder to find.

Intel isn’t the only one reallocating wafer capacity. Major memory vendors, including Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, are also grappling with capacity shortages in the face of AI demand.

Riccardo Mori ☛ The digicams return

As someone who has been into photography since the 1980s, and who has used these compact cameras when they were the latest and greatest in digital photography, this ongoing trend is more than just a fad or just another excuse to achieve originality or to look, well, trendy. And it isn’t fake nostalgia either. This type of photography brings back real memories.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Project Censored ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Proposed Arizona Mine’s Water Sampling Reveals Dangerous Metal Levels

New York Times ☛ U.S. Formally Withdraws From World Health Organization

Global health experts worry that a lack of international coordination will lead to death and disaster.

IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Clinical trials and tribulations

Proprietary

Tom’s Hardware ☛ NASA taps popular PC hardware performance tool for cockpit simulations — government software approval process for CapFrameX started by the space agency

CapFrameX, a popular benchmarking tool, has recently been considered by NASA Langley as a tool to check the performance of its cockpit simulator video systems. According to an X post by the company, the U.S. space agency has begun the government software approval process needed to get the app installed on their cockpit simulators, and that it was the agency, not CapFrameX, that initiated the process.

Howard Oakley ☛ Can you still run old App Store apps?

As I explained, the general rule for certificates is that, once they have expired by date, they’re no longer valid. However, to ensure that third-party apps and installers can still be used after their expiry, Apple usually includes a trusted timestamp in their signature. Provided the certificate was valid at the time the app or installer was signed, then macOS should accept it as still being valid, as long as it hasn’t been revoked. But App Store apps are different again.

David Bushell ☛ Proton Spam and the AI Consent Problem – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

There is a problem with this email. And I’m not talking about the question of how exactly AI aligns with Proton’s core values of privacy and security.

The problem is I had already explicitly opted out of Lumo emails.

Leon Mika ☛ HV #old Submission - Leon Mika

Here’s my submission for Hemispheric View’s #155 request for fun and interesting computer peripherals (#old). In the abstract, this one’s neither fun nor interesting, yet it’s one I remember fondly. It’s the HP DeskJet 690c colour printer: [...]

Jim Nielsen ☛ CTA Hierarchy in the Wild

But link hijacking isn’t why I’m writing this post.

What struck me was the ordering and visual emphasis of the “call to action” (CTA) buttons. I almost clicked “Back to YouTube”, which was precisely the action I didn’t want.

I paused and laughed to myself.

Look how the design pattern for primary/secondary user interface controls has inverted over time: [...]

[Old] Andrew Moore ☛ Goodbye Adobe: Saying No to Colour Cartels

At the time of writing this blog post, there has been no public statement from Adobe or Pantone. Users who previously were using spot colours are forced to pay an extra subscription on top of Adobe’s already steep pricing in order to open their previous works. Of course, Adobe didn’t adjust their pricing to account for the missing functionality.

This whole locking of colours happened after I had already decided to drop Adobe, so it just confirmed that I was making the right decision. Removing or degrading functionality in a subscription-based service is unacceptable.

Fiona Runge ☛ runjak.codes: An adversarial coding test

My first step was to look at the history of .vscode/tasks.json. I hoped that this would highlight exciting changes and shortcut having to scroll through the entire file.

Microsoft works to restore Outlook, Teams after outage [Ed: Microsoft collapses again]

Thousands of Microsoft users ran into trouble with their email and work apps.

Outlook and Teams went down late Thursday morning.

Microsoft noted some users couldn’t send or receive email and were getting server error messages.

“We’re investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview,” Microsoft stated on X around 11:30 a.m.

The latest update from the company said it restored the infrastructure but is working to mitigate the impact.

Gamer Network Limited ☛ "We all have strong opinions within the studio" – even Microsoft’s own game developers are hesitant to use AI [Ed: Slop, not "AI"]

Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven’t yet found a part of development where they can use it. "Right now, we generally use it for things like this," Kath says, indicating our call. "A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that."

But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online’s development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. "I don’t know what our decision is going to be, because we’re still having conversations about where we go with that," Kath says. "Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future."

Seattle Times ☛ Sweeping Amazon layoffs slated for next week, Reuters reports

Amazon may lay off thousands of employees next week, continuing a plan to broadly cut its corporate workforce, Reuters first reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources.

In late October, Reuters reported Amazon was planning to let go of about 30,000 employees. A day after the report, Amazon announced it was cutting 14,000 roles and implied that job losses could continue into 2026.

Reuters reported that Amazon’s planned layoffs next week will likely mirror last year’s in size.

Gulf News ☛ Intel shares plunge on earnings expectations

Intel shares dove more than 10 percent Thursday despite the struggling US chip maker doing better than expected in the recently ended quarter, as its revenue forecast disappointed investors.

Intel reported a loss of $600 million on revenue of $13.7 billion in the final three months of last year.

Shopify makes more job cuts, this time targeting partnerships team

Shopify has made what appears to be another round of layoffs, less than three months after its last job cuts. This time, the job losses have hit the company’s partnerships team.

Starting Wednesday morning, employees in the partnerships division of Canada’s largest tech company began posting on LinkedIn that their roles had been “eliminated” as part of a broader “restructuring” or “reorganization.” It’s unclear how many people lost their jobs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Malaysia Will Take Legal Action Against Musk’s X and XAI Over Misuse of Grok Chatbot

Tom’s Hardware ☛ Nvidia accused of trying to cut a deal with Anna’s Archive for high‑speed access to the massive pirated book haul — allegedly chased stolen data to fuel its LLMs

Nvidia has been accused of offering to pay for ‘high-speed access’ to Anna’s Archive, a notorious ‘shadow library’ portal, bursting with copyright-infringing materials.

IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] [Guest Post] Labelling AI-Generated Content: Key Insights from the European Code’s First Draft [Ed: They mean slop or CG - worthless crap in very large volumes, wasting energy]

The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Will Google be third time lucky with new, AI-powered smart glasses? [Ed: NOT "AI-powered", just rebranded with buzzwords and mindless hype]

[Repeat] Futurism ☛ Majority of CEOs Alarmed as AI Delivers No Financial Returns

According to a recent survey by professional services network PwC, more than half of the 4,454 CEO respondents said “their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI.”

Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI is eating the world’s memory - and we’re all going to pay the price

But the price surge is rippling through consumer markets.

Research firms IDC and Counterpoint both now expect global smartphone sales to shrink at least 2% this year, in a sharp reversal from their growth outlook a few months ago. That would mark the first annual decline in shipments since 2023.

The Conversation ☛ Is AI hurting your ability to think? How to reclaim your brain

Essentially, AI is replacing tasks many people have grown reluctant to do themselves – thinking, writing, creating, analysing. But when we don’t use these skills, they can decline.

We also risk getting things very, very wrong. Generative AI works by predicting likely words from patterns trained on vast amounts of data. When you ask it to write an email or give advice, its responses sound logical. But it does not understand or know what is true.

Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Dealing with AI Bots – COAR Website

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has just announced the new Dealing with AI Bots website that provides a wealth of information on bots and crawlers impacting the services and operations of open repositories, including mitigation strategies; see the announcement below for more information. This work follows a survey COAR conducted of its members in spring 2025 to better understand the scope and scale of the problem; COAR Executive Director Kathleen Shearer provided a video report of the project for the July 2025 issue of CNI’s Pre-recorded Project Briefing Series, available here: Artificial Intelligence Bots and Repositories—Results and Next Steps from COAR Survey.

Tom’s Hardware ☛ Microsoft CEO says AI needs to have a wider impact or else it risks quickly losing ‘social permission’ — also says that the technology should benefit more people to avoid a bubble

The rush to build AI infrastructure is putting a strain on many different resources. For example, we’re in the middle of a memory chip shortage because of the massive demand for HBM that AI GPUs require. It’s estimated that data centers will consume 70% of memory chips made this year, with the shortage going beyond RAM modules and SSDs and starting to affect other components and products like GPUs and smartphones.

The Register UK ☛ Cursor shows AI agents capable of shoddy code at scale

"It *kind of* works! It still has issues and is of course very far from WebKit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly," he added.

Some developers managed to compile the code after some bug fixes. Others reported success after revisions to the build instructions.

But by and large, developers aren’t convinced Cursor has made a breakthrough.

RTL ☛ Following controversy: Musk’s Grok created three million sexualized images, research says

“The AI tool Grok is estimated to have generated approximately three million sexualized images, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, after the launch of a new image editing feature powered by the tool on X,” said the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog that researches the harmful effects of online disinformation.

CCDH’s report estimated that Grok generated this volume of photorealistic images over an 11-day period – an average rate of 190 per minute.

New York Times ☛ Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. Chatbot Made Millions of Sexualized Images, New Estimates Show

In just nine days, Grok posted more than 4.4 million images. A review by The Times conservatively estimated that at least 41 percent of posts, or 1.8 million, most likely contained sexualized imagery of women. A broader analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, using a statistical model, estimated that 65 percent, or just over three million, contained sexualized imagery of men, women or children.

Dark Reading ☛ AI Agents Are Bringing Back Browser Insecurity

Agentic browsers suffer from a key security weakness — inadequate isolation — according to research published last week by Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity research consultancy. The current crop of agentic browsers treat the agent as a proxy for the user, allowing it to cross different tabs and even the local system, as if the agent were an authorized, known user.

404 Media ☛ Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’

This sudden shift away from years of messaging about being a compatriot with sex workers, combined with bizarre AI-generated text and images about talking to aliens and numerology on social media, has made some creators worry for their livelihoods, and caused others to leave the site completely.

The Verge ☛ Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi rides

Whether this demonstration represents progress or perhaps a disaster waiting to happen, time will tell. Tesla still uses a waitlist for its robotaxi service, and is rumored to only have a couple dozen vehicles operating in Texas. And even with the safety monitors, Tesla’s robotaxis have crashed approximately eight times in just five months, according to Eletrek. Fans are obviously thrilled by Tesla’s progress, while critics call it a con designed to highlight a capability that doesn’t exist.

Bruce Schneier ☛ Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.

Daniel Stenberg ☛ [Daniel’s week] January 16, 2026

We started out the week receiving seven Hackerone issues within a sixteen hour period. Some of them were true and proper bugs, and taking care of this lot took a good while. Eventually we concluded that none of them identified a vulnerability and we now count twenty submissions done already in 2026.

We made some noise as I mentioned my PR in progress [1] that is about to remove all mentioned of a bug-bounty from the curl documentation. It is still in the planning phase and there will be more communication done about it, but we aim at shutting this down by the end of January 2026.

The main goal with shutting down the bounty is to remove the incentive for people to submit crap and non-well researched reports to us. AI generated or not. The current torrent of submissions put a high load on the curl security team and this is an attempt to reduce the noise.

We believe, hope really, that we still will get actual security vulnerabilities reported to us even if we do not pay for them. The future will tell.

The Register UK ☛ Curl shutters bug bounty program to stop AI slop

Readers may recall that Stenberg started complaining about AI-generated bug reports in early 2024, and by mid-2025 contemplated killing the project’s bug bounty program. After receiving some strong bug reports that a developer found with help from AI, Stenberg acknowledged that AI can be a fine bug-hunting aid.

Stenberg addressed his decision in a mailing message that opened with news that last week the project’s bug bounty scheme generated seven submissions and that while some identified bugs, none described a vulnerability.

Ars Technica ☛ Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"

The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.

“We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

Hugo Daniel ☛ I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a CLAUDE.md file

Made an appeal, which was a link to a google docs form, with a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization that I was not only a human but also a well-intended one.

I got no reply. Not even an automatic response. 0 comms.

So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization.

I got no reply. Not even an automatic response.

Social Control Media

Google ☛ YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2026 Letter: The Future of YouTube - YouTube Blog

As we enter 2026, the lines between creativity and technology are blurring, sparking a new era of innovation. This inflection point requires ambitious bets.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

Futurism ☛ Activists Say Ring Cameras Are Being Used by ICE

Among them is Amazon subsidiary Ring, the company behind those AI doorbell cameras that have exploded in popularity over the last few years. Back in October, Ring announced that its devices would soon be looped into a network of Flock AI surveillance cameras. That network, an investigation by 404 Media found, has been available to local and federal police and enforcement agencies like ICE — leaving many worried that their Ring doorbell cams are now feeding into a government panopticon.

404 Media ☛ ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock’s Nationwide Network of Cameras

In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.

Common Dreams ☛ DOGE [sic] Stole Private Social Security Data. Congress Must Investigate Now.

Unions and advocates quickly filed a lawsuit to bar DOGE [sic] from accessing the data, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary injunction restoring DOGE [sic]’s access. Now, we are beginning to learn what DOGE [sic] is doing with it.

New court filings related to the lawsuit reveal that DOGE [sic] operatives entered an agreement with an advocacy group to share private Social Security data — with the goal of overturning election results in several states. The filings do not reveal the identity of either the DOGE [sic] operatives or the advocacy group.

The Register UK ☛ Europe’s GDPR cops dished out €1.2B in fines last year

The figures come from the latest GDPR Fines and Data Breach Survey published by DLA Piper, which puts total fines issued across Europe last year at roughly £1 billion (€1.2 billion), up from £996 million in 2024. While that year-on-year increase is modest, regulators have now handed down €7.1 billion (£6.2 billion) in penalties since GDPR came into force in May 2018.

The fines may look familiar, but breach reporting does not. From 28 January 2025 to the present, Europe’s data protection authorities received an average of 443 personal data breach notifications a day. That’s up 22 percent on the year before, and marks the first time daily reports have pushed past 400 since the regulation came into force.

Android Police ☛ Your photos and emails can now influence your Google Search

Just last week, Google took a massive leap in its AI strategy. The tech giant rolled out Personal Intelligence for Gemini, which lets the AI tool take a look into your Gmail, Photos, Search data, and even your YouTube History to give you personalized answers.

Although Gemini has already been able to connect to other native Google apps, Personal Intelligence allows the tool to reason across those sources and retrieve specific details from them.

Don Marti ☛ the best DROP site is no DROP site

This is an excellent idea, the deletions are scheduled to start taking effect on August 1, and other states will be copying DROP soon. But what if they didn’t have to?

Right now, if you want to do a deletion, you have to go to the DROP site and do a whole workflow with web forms and verification and stuff. We will be helping people out with this at the Oakland Privacy booth at Southern California Linux Expo in March.

Site36 ☛ Spy in Bremen conducted sexual relationships with target persons and suffered depression due to "double life"

The German Interventionist Left has outed an informant who allegedly spied on left-wing structures in Bremen for more than eight years. Despite the man’s known depression, the domestic secret service is said to have repeatedly extended his deployment.

BoingBoing ☛ Ireland wants police spyware and facial recognition

A separate Recording Devices Bill from December 2025 proposes expanded biometric recognition, potentially enabling both live and retrospective facial recognition across Ireland’s police force.

The Washington State Legislature ☛ House Bill 2321, Washington State Legislature

An act relating to preventing the unlawful manufacturing of firearms by requiring three-dimensional printers to be equipped with certain blocking technologies; adding a new chapter to Title 19 RCW; and prescribing penalties.

Windows Central ☛ Microsoft Teams wants to become your boss’ lapdog, automatically snitching on your live location inside the office Wi-Fi — but it won’t ship until it’s bug-free

Last year, a controversial feature shipping to Microsoft Teams raised concerns and even sparked backlash from users. It’s expected to automatically update a user’s location when they connect their device to an office Wi-Fi network. As a result, your manager or boss can tell whether you’re working from the office.

Shortly after this concept went viral across the web, Microsoft updated how the feature works, further indicating that it’s an opt-in experience, which will ship disabled by default.

Defence/Aggression

Chronicle Of Higher Education ☛ ‘The Perception of Danger Everywhere’: Navigating Campus Life Amid ICE Enforcement

Locals, students, and college officials in the Twin Cities describe the mood as tense, apprehensive, and heavy./blockquote>

Futurism ☛ Fury as Amazon Ring Cameras Are Hooked Up to ICE System

"Your Ring camera is an ICE agent."

Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] Why Germany, India face obstacles to closer strategic ties

Time ☛ Can the 25th Amendment Be Used to Remove Trump From Office?

The law is implemented across a number of scenarios, including if the President dies or resigns while in office under Section 1 or the President themselves withdraws from the position, which can be temporarily, under Section 3.

If it is decided that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” Section 4 of the Amendment can be used. In such scenarios, the Vice President will take up the position of President.

Now, lawmakers are calling for the Amendment to be applied within Section 4, with many Democrats expressing the opinion that Trump is unfit for office.

International Bar Association ☛ Comment and analysis: President Trump and the 25th Amendment | International Bar Association

Trump would be the oldest president in US history at age 82 by the time his term ends in January 2029. Were Vice President Vance, who is 41, and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, it would be a first in American history. Whether or not Section 4 is ever invoked, the debate underscores the fragility of America’s constitutional safeguards of presidential competence and the depth of unease about President Trump’s capacity to govern.

Gannett ☛ What is the 25th Amendment? Lawmakers call for Trump removal

The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lays out the rules of succession for the presidential office and those for presidential disability or removal.

Project Censored ☛ The AI War Machine as Superorganism

Praising the technological wonders of Palantir, Anduril, and other military AI companies that engage in mass surveillance and lethal targeting operations, Overmatched reads like an advertising campaign for those businesses, designed to justify increasing the US war budget by amplifying fear of China’s AI prowess. The Editorial Board’s characterization of China’s supposed military AI superiority echoes the false claim of a nuclear missile gap promoted by John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy had asserted that the US lagged fatally behind Russia in nuclear missile production, when in fact the opposite was the case. The resulting moral panic helped to propel him into office, and he increased the war budget.

Overmatched bemoans waste in Pentagon spending on “legacy” armaments sold by the five “Prime” weapons manufacturers. But Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman also make artificially intelligent weapons systems. The series calls for increasing the unauditable war budget by hundreds of billions of dollars to buy more autonomous weapons, satellites, drones, and AI-enabled command-and-control systems.

Organizationally leaner and hugely capitalized, Silicon Valley “neo-Primes” such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX are flush with no-bid, open-ended Pentagon contracts for developing global surveillance and “kill chain” targeting systems, lethal drone swarming functions, weaponized satellites, unmanned warships, submarines, tanks, airplanes, and smart rockets.

The Register UK ☛ House of Lords votes to ban social media for under-16s

On Wednesday evening, the Lords voted 261 to 150 in favor of amending the children’s wellbeing and schools bill to require social media services to introduce age checks to block under-16s from access within a year. It will also require the chief medical officers to publish advice for parents on children’s use of social media.

Unless members of parliament vote to remove the amendment from the bill when it returns to the House of Commons, it will become law.

New York Times ☛ TikTok Strikes Deal to Create New U.S. Entity and Loosen App’s Ties to China

Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture. That list also includes the personal investment entity for Michael Dell, the tech billionaire behind Dell Technologies, and other firms, TikTok said. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.

The Verge ☛ The TikTok deal is done, finally

A press release announcing the deal’s closure didn’t say how much those stakes cost or give details about potentially launching a new app in the US. It did say that the joint venture’s oversight of “comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users” will apply to TikTok, the video editor CapCut, Lemon8, and “a portfolio” of other apps and services.

For now, most of what we know is about the joint venture’s seven-member board, which includes TikTok US CEO Shou Zi Chew, and its first executive appointments, with TikTok’s former head of operations and trust and safety, Adam Presser, now serving as CEO.

RTL ☛ Will serve over 200 million users : TikTok establishes joint venture to end US ban threat - RTL Today

The video-sharing app is a global digital entertainment powerhouse but its mass appeal and links to China have raised concerns over privacy and national security.

The TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will serve more than 200 million users and 7.5 million businesses while implementing strict safeguards for data protection and content moderation, the company said.

Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The Rupture

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it’s already yesterday’s news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I’d suggest it’s this.

It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world.

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Full text of Mark Carney speech, World Economic Forum, January 20, 2026 [...]

Michael Geist ☛ Canadian TikTok Ban Called Off as the Government Hits the Digital Policy Reset Button Once Again

The reset on the TikTok ban came through what amounts to a settlement between the government and TikTok that was made official yesterday by the federal court. TikTok had challenged the government’s ban order as part of a judicial review process. While initial reports suggested that the court had overturned the government’s order banning the company, as the screenshot from the judgment shows, the reality is that the government asked the court to do so as it filed the motion asking that the order be set aside.

BoingBoing ☛ JD Vance still lying about Minneapolis

Vance’s insistence that Americans should not peacefully protest in the streets, but rather take their voices to the ballot box, is laughable. The Trump Administration threatens elected leaders who disagree with them and demands that their puppet DOJ investigate them. Trump has suggested we should do away with elections. They aren’t listening to the voters; they are stomping on their necks and spraying them in the eyes with mace. This is an act of brutalizing dissent while pretending elections still matter.

YLE ☛ Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s

The recommendations are stricter than a draft version published last autumn, which only referred to banning social media. That attracted an exceptionally large number of comments from parents – more than 6,000 of them – most of whom supported the restrictions. Researchers and experts also urged stricter recommendations.

The THL plans to develop recommendations for 14–18-year-olds later this year.

Atlantic Council ☛ Trump may move on from Greenland. Europe won’t.

Europe will now have to swiftly translate the lessons from the past few weeks into building greater resilience and sovereignty, if not strategic autonomy.

Europeans will be well advised to do more contingency planning for how to resist economic coercion, even from their allies and partners.

The Strategist ☛ Offshore wind can be a security hazard. Australia needs a risk assessment

Australia should pause offshore wind developments until it completes a comprehensive national security risk assessment of them.

Mexico News Daily ☛ Sheinbaum endorses Carney’s WEF speech lamenting ‘rupture’ of world order: Wednesday’s mañanera recapped

On Wednesday, the president took a moment to praise the address Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and pitched her government’s vision of investment.

France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man chides Carney after Canadian PM delivers rousing speech on global order ‘rupture’ at Davos

The Insurrectionist chided Mark Carney in a ⁠speech in Davos on Wednesday after the Canadian prime minister delivered a rousing address on a "rupture" in the international rules-based order. FRANCE 24’s Christopher Guly reports from Ottawa.

New York Times ☛ At Davos, a Clash Between Convicted Felon’s World and the Old World

For decades, leaders have gathered in Davos to discuss a shared economic and political future. On Wednesday, Hell Toupée turned the forum into a bracing clash between his worldview and theirs.

New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Moves on Greenland

After assailing Europe in a long speech at Davos, the president said he had won an agreement on the future of the Arctic territory.

New York Times ☛ An Unhinged President on the Magic Mountain

Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Davos speech could have been ghostwritten by Mario Puzo.

New York Times ☛ [Did the U.S.